I’ve been bashing netbooks lately, but after several rounds of feedback from pro netbook friends, I’ve decided to give mine another shot.
THE BACKSTORY
My desktop PC crashed a couple of months ago and I have been slow in coming up with a solution for accessing the data on my two hard drives. In the meantime, the MacBook Pro has become my primary computer and I use Parallel’s to run Windows & Windows Applications when needed. It all works smoothly and I don’t have any plans to change anything up. However, I’d like to use my 30 inch display and be able to get the data on the 2 hard drives that reside in my PC. Note: I don’t use the display with my MacBook Pro because the colors are so different between the two displays that it bothers me.
THE IDEA
I have this ASUS Eee PC sitting on my desk collecting dust, so I use that as my desktop. Right now I am running Ubuntu Linux and it works fine for a netbook. I am using a VGA cable to connect it to the display, wireless keyboard and mouse through one of the USB ports and the pièce de résistance — a USB SATA dual hard drive dock from Thermaltake (STU0014U).
THE OUTCOME
- Honkin’ Display
- Wireless Keyboard & Mouse
- Access to all the data on one* of the two PC hard drives. The Thermaltake BlacX Duet was truly plug and play with Linux. It mounted the drive with no problem, the *only issue I have now is that one of the hard drives is an old IDE, so I’ll invest in an external enclosure and move the data over to the other SATA hard drive sometime in the future.
THE FUTURE
My plan is to use the netbook as a storage gateway and for light internet browsing, I’ll still use the MacBook Pro for the heavy lifting.
I may not have found a conventional use for the netbook, but I think I’ve found something to do with it. That makes me happy as it’s no longer a paperweight and it’ll make my friends happy because I am getting some use out of a product that they believe in.
